Wine tasting isn't easy. Each wine touches multiple senses with multiple inputs. You can get sensory overload. These all get processed by different sections of the brain. Then you have to make sense of it all.
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| Deep in thought. It must be the wine. :) image from Vogue |
Your overall opinion of the wine can be affected by its price, what food you may be having with it, who you are with, your medical condition, what music you are playing, what glass you're drinking from, and lots more. Your mental processes can take you in all sorts of directions.
Many of us have had the experience of tasting the same wine at two different times, liking it one time and not liking it the other. Mind-boggling, huh? Wine is complex, the brain is complex.
This gets studied because wine marketing types want to know how to sell you wine. There are even studies looking into what music brings out what elements in wine. Does Bach bring out the fruit characteristics, AC/DC the tannins? Maybe we'll know someday.
Taste and smell are probably the most important senses with wine, or are at least the ones talked about the most. There's also visual, such as color, clarity, and viscosity. There's mouth feel (touch), such as viscosity again, astringency (usually tannins in red wines), and burning from high alcohol.
It's possible
that tasting wine engages more of the brain than any other human
activity. It's even been suggested wine is a good mental exercise.
Listening to music and trying to solve complex problems, like your 8th
grade algebra, is also said to be great for mental stimulation.
Personally, I have a glass of wine while listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan
play guitar rather than trying to solve for x.
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| How does he do that? Maybe a glass of zinfandel will help |
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